On Clarke’s recommendation I just finished reading Critical Chain by Eli Goldratt. This is another of his “novels”, in which this time he applies the ideas of TOC to project management. I liked the book’s use of the TOC thinking tools. And I also liked the discussion in the last couple of pages, about using dollar-days as the unit to measure investment - although I need to think about it a lot more before I’ll come close to understanding it.
The main thrusts of the book are that managing slack at the project level is better than managing it per task, and that the critical path/chain is the bottleneck in a project, and therefore needs to be protected. Again, I need to think about this a lot before I can fully see how - or whether - these ideas will apply to an agile software project…
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